Bram Bourgonjon Photography and student blog

Aperture vs. Lightroom

Okay, I’ve decided to do a real comparison between Aperture and Lightroom.

Pro Aperture :

• Workflow is easier, faster to learn.
• File management is better, more intuitive. Especially the smart albums.
• Exporting with watermark is standard.

Contra Aperture:

• Very very slow starting up, editing and exporting.
• Too minimalistic

Pro Lightroom:

• Speeeeeeeed ! Exporting this set was done in 2 minutes for LR, 15 for Aperture. No kiddin’
• Local adjustment brush
• Presets
• Gradients
• History (how come Aperture doesn’t have this ??!!!)
• Web shows can be exported and uploaded at the same time
• Looks great
• Straighten by drawing a visible line. I was gonna request this for Aperture 3.0.
• Crop overlays are standard visible (in Aperture you have to push cmd to see it) and there are a lot of overlays available
• More photographers use this, so you can share more knowledge

Contra Lightroom:

• Not so intuitive
• File management is not as easy as Aperture
• You can’t change the keyboard shortcuts

Conclusion:

Lightroom looks like a more pro application. Aperture is more intuitive and easier to work with, but slower. So if you do minimal post-processing and have a good mac and you would like to integrate your pictures with all the rest (for example your iPhone), go for Aperture. However, if you’re kind of stuck with Aperture and always wanted a local adjustment brush or something like that, go for Lightroom, you get the speed for free.

So now, you gotta judge a program on it’s results too. I have edited the same shoot twice: in Aperture and in Lightroom. Below, you can see the two sets.

Lightroom

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Aperture

Click to see all pictures

Also a big thanks at the model Tess and my assistent Zzeb.